Dr Johnson and Mr Savage. Richard Holmes
single London Bridge at Southwark in the East End.
The river was itself a thoroughfare as busy as the Strand, packed with skiffs, wherries, sailing barges and every conceivable kind and size of water-taxi, which passengers hailed at scores of stairs, landing-stages and pontoons. This constant flow of human traffic, east-west along the Strand and the Thames, by day and night, represented the shuttle of power and business activity within the capital.
So, to the east of the Strand, from Ludgate to the Tower and Spitalfields, lay commercial London: banking, broking, shipping, publishing, manufacturing, and the slums. This was the original, historical sire of Grub Street, a narrow road of printers, taverns and lodging-houses roughly where the Barbican and the Museum of the City of London now stands.8 It was where Edward Cave had established his Gentleman’s Magazine, in rooms actually above the old medieval arch of St John’s Gate, in Clerkenwell, which young Johnson ‘beheld with reverence’ when he first arrived in London. It was where a young writer began when he came to seek his fortune, and where an old one ended if he had failed to find it. It was the kingdom of Alexander Pope’s Dunces. It was the East End of hope, and of despair.
But this is not where Johnson and Savage walked all night: they had gone ‘up West’ to the London of political power, wealth and social privilege. They were walking in enemy territory, the land to be conquered, and they came like spies in the night, their very presence a provocation.
To the west of the Strand, then, lay the smart coffee-houses of Charing Cross, the ministries of Westminster and Whitehall, Parliament and the Court, the royal parks and the elegant new squares of what became Mayfair. St James’s Square, only laid out in the 1720s, was the home of dukes and dandies, next to the clubs of St James’s and the royal palace itself. To talk of ministerial corruption and ‘patriotism’ here was like blowing a trumpet under the walls of Jericho. It was an heroic gesture, a defiant pose, which a painter like Reynolds would not forget.
Moreover, such a night-incursion into the domain of wealth and privilege was not a casual expedition. Reynolds may not have known this, but for Savage it was almost a ritual, repeated many times previously and solemnly enshrined in his own writings. In taking his young protégé Johnson into these familiar haunts, he was guiding him ceremonially, as Virgil guides Dante, through a purgatorial topography where much is to be learned by the angry young provincial, familiar only with book-learning:
The Moon, descending, saw us now pursue
The various Talk: – the City near in view!
Here from still Life (he cries) avert thy Sight,
And mark what Deeds adorn, or shame the Night!9
This is from the key poetic document of Savage’s career, the long visionary poem The Wanderer (1729), part meditation and part confession. Here, in its third canto, Savage describes such a night-pilgrimage through London. The young poet is guided by the Virgilian figure of ‘the Hermit’, a sage who has retired from the fret and folly of city life, to read poetry and philosophy in a cave and contemplate the wild beauty of Nature. This is one of Savage’s recurring fantasies of himself, as Johnson eventually came to understand.
The Hermit points out the glittering, delusive dissipations of the West End, as Savage must have instructed Johnson during their own nocturnal pacings round the squares of Mayfair:
Yon Mansion, made by beaming Tapers gay,
Drowns the dim Night, and counterfeits the Day.
From lumin’d windows glancing on the Eye,
Around, athwart, the frisking Shadows fly.
There Midnight Riot spreads illusive Joys,
And Fortune, Health, and dearer Time destroys.10
Against this glimpse of shadow play of aristocratic revelry the Hermit points out the solitary light from a garret window, which signals the ‘patriot’ poet hard at work, perhaps at the other end of the Strand, somewhere near Grub Street. For him, true wealth is not a handsome building, a property speculation, but an intellectual construction, a mental tower of learning and independent intelligence:
A feeble Taper, from yon lonesome Room,
Scatt’ring thin rays, just glimmers through the Gloom.
There sits the sapient BARD in museful Mood,
And glows impassion’d for his Country’s Good!
All the bright Spirits of the Just, combin’d,
Inform, refine, and prompt his tow’ring Mind!11
One may suspect, like Boswell, that Savage’s poetry was more improving than his conduct on such occasions. His Hermit, to say the least, is an idealisation. For it was on just such a night-walk, ten years before, that Savage had been involved in a brawl in a whorehouse, and killed a man and injured a woman, five minutes from St James’s Square in Charing Cross. As Johnson later observed, ‘The reigning Error of his Life was, that he mistook the Love for the Practice of Virtue’.12
When Johnson himself came to describe such night-walks in his own poem London (May 1738), he was much less dreamy and elevated. Indeed he was bitingly realistic, and we see again the big man with the cudgel. He seems to make some unmistakable reference to Savage’s less poetical exploits:
Prepare for Death, if here at Night you roam,
And sign your Will before you sup from Home.
Some fiery Fop, with new Commission vain,
Who sleeps on Brambles till he kills his Man;
Some frolick Drunkard, reeling from a Feast,
Provokes a Broil, and stabs you for a Jest.13
The irony here may be deeper than it first appears. Because this may be Savage himself speaking. There is considerable evidence that this passage, and indeed much of the poem, is a dramatic monologue written partly in Savage’s own voice. The whole of London may be partly Johnson’s attempt to render, in verse, the impact of Savage’s long conversations through the night. In this sense the poem could be considered as Johnson’s first version of Savage’s biography.
Certainly it seems true that Johnson first discovered in their night-walks the new form of intimate life-writing. It was to be like an extended conversation in the dark, taking ordinary facts and anecdotes, and pursuing them towards the shadowy and mysterious regions of a life, at the edge of the unknown or unknowable.
Johnson’s early impressions of these night-walks continue to be modified, in a complex way, by the other friends who recollected them. Arthur Murphy, a genial Irish playwright nearly twenty years Johnson’s junior, turned them into a piece of delightful comedy. Moving them even deeper into the West End, to the edge of Hyde Park, he added picturesque details of time and money, and with his playful turns of phrase seems to conjure up the witty outlines of a sketch that might have been written long after by Peacock or G. B. Shaw. (It should be read, perhaps, in a light Dublin brogue.)
Johnson has been often heard to relate, that he and Savage walked round Grosvenor Square till four in the morning; in the course of their conversation reforming the world, dethroning princes, establishing new forms of government, and giving laws to the several states of Europe, till, fatigued at length with their legislative office, they began to feel the want of refreshment; but could not muster up more than fourpence halfpenny.14
The ‘fourpence halfpenny’ is, of course, a spurious comic exactitude. Yet there is something about Murphy’s whole scenario, with its gracious absurdities, that carries a curious literary conviction. Why is this?
It is, surely, that Murphy has captured or suggested a premonition of the high, elegant, philosophic comedy of Johnson’s Rasselas (1759). The destitute Savage talking to Johnson about giving laws to Europe is not unlike the deluded Astronomer telling Prince Imlac that he has been secretly assigned the universal regulation of the weather. ‘… The sun has listened to my dictates, and